Christmas Memoir: Naomi

Christmas Memoir: Naomi

Rebecca, her mother Naomi, & her mother Janette

Next to Easter, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day are the most joyous occasions in my life.

My childhood memories of Christmas are a treasure. Everyone was on his or her best behavior. Santa Claus would NOT visit a dirty house, so my brother and I had to help our mom clean the house in the morning and the afternoon of the twenty-fourth.

We always went to Christmas Eve Candlelight Services and I remember my 3 year-old little brother trying to stay awake long enough to as he said, “Put a fire on my candle.”

I remember the church being dark, and slowly, as each person share his or her light with another, the whole church was illuminated, spreading a sense of wonder among toddlers, teenagers, adults, business people, carpenters, plumbers, physicians and elderly wise people. It was breath taking.

And as that moment was literally extinguished with the blowing out of the candles, a new sense of excitement rose. People who opened presents on Christmas Eve wanted to rush home and tear open their gifts.

Ours was an ethnically mixed family.  Dad, a Scandinavian, wanted to celebrate Christmas Eve. Mom, of British origins, wanted to wait until Christmas Day.

So they cut a deal, on the twenty-fourth, Dad made supper before church: Lutefisk and oyster stew. We got to open gifts from relatives living far away that night.

The next morning, no child was allowed out of the bedroom until Mom had checked to see if Santa Claus had visited and left some gifts. Then she and my father went to the living room as my brother and I raced out of our bedrooms, still in our pajamas, to see what Santa Claus had given us.

I think Mom and Dad had just as much fun watching our eyes and facial expressions as we kids had looking over the gifts. But we never forgot that it was a religious event and the celebration was in honor of Christ’s birth.

While Dad made the lutefisk and oyster stew, Mom made sure we lit the advent candles of joy, peace, love, hope and last, but most important, the Christ child candle.

Split Rock Lighthouse, MN Celebrates 100 years - first posted Aug. 3, 2010

The worse case of vertigo I’ve ever had was just past Split Rock Lighthouse, near Two Harbors, Minnesota.  My mom, younger brother Tony, Anna and me had walked from the lighthouse to the Lake Superior overlook parapet.  No problem.  It was the 130-foot look down a vertical slab of dark grey rock, to the jagged stone edge of the lake below that did me in.  Even now, 25 years later I can still get a knot in my stomach recalling that view. Yet it was enchanting, too.

It’s with slack-jaw amazement to discover Split Rock Lighthouse was constructed by hauling ALL the building materials UP from the lake, all “310 tons of brick, concrete, mortar, steel and wood, using a steam hoisting engine with derrick and a 60-foot boom.”  This month’s Minnesota Conservation Volunteer magazine shares this little gem and many more in honor of the 100th anniversary of Split Rock Lighthouse, on July 31, 2010.























When 29 ships were lost in a severe November 1905 storm the federal government stepped in, constructing a lighthouse to ensure safer shipping along the North Shore, where the taconite mining industry was just getting underway. The project cost $75,000 and came in over budget due to the remote locale without roads.  By 1916 a dock and elevated tramway replaced the derrick. “Six weeks after opening the keeper’s log reported a ‘party of visitors.’  Tourists kept coming, by boat or by footpath.  The North Shore highway opened in 1924, really increasing tourism.”  By 1936 the keeper reported 36,000 visitors.

By 1940 the lighthouse was converted from kerosene to electricity. The Fresnel lens of the light flashed for two seconds every 18 seconds.  French physicist Augustin-Jean Fresnel designed the lens specially for lighthouses, employing refracted glass, which uses less glass, so lighter in weight, with a longer beam.














                

1: Cross section of a Fresnel lens
2: Cross section of a conventional
plano-convex lens of equivalent power   -Wiki


Split Rock Lighthouse was retired by the U.S. Coast Guard in 1969.  It’s now operated by the Minnesota Historical Society which has spiffed up the place for the celebration.  The Light, keeper’s brick cottages and the fog horn building have taken quite a beating from one hundred years’ of Lake Superior nor’easters.  All the renovations are historically accurate, of course.

Photographs taken by Carol and my mom, Julia Mitchell, 1981, with photo prof Harley Straus’ loaned Pentax.  Slice of Lake Superior below thanks to You Tube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31RQXehH7V0

Convicted sniper John Allen Muhammad looks around the courtroom at the beginning of his trial in Virginia Beach, Va., in this Oct. 14, 2003 file photo. (Lawrence Jackson/AP photo)

 November 2003

During his trial, the Washington Post and the Washington Times recently ran a large above-the-fold, front-page color photograph of accused 2002 Washington area sniper, John Allen Muhammad.  This photo sends mixed messages.  If a newspaper's mission is to provide the who, what where, when, and why of a news story, this particular photography blurred that mission.

The photo ran extra large, larger than most photos of individuals.  As a portrait photographer, I would certainly say it showed some of the mystery of the man, capturing a cunning of the eyes, that one can imagine he used to beguile a young impressionable companion.  But the golden background and the stillness of the subject, another antithesis of most newspaper photographs, cast a more portrait studio/hagiography quality to this image.  And therein lies confusion.

Photographs have a language.  The most basic feature, black and white vs. color, can be regarded as the particular language, i.e. Spanish or English.  The grammar is how the photographer uses the equipment.  Sports photographers usually use long telephoto lens, which compress action, making it almost more engaging than if you were at a game.  That's why a shot of a baseball pitcher aimed at the batter seems much closer than if we were stood right next to the pitcher.  Many news photographers use wide-angle lens to capture as much of the action as possible.  Portrait photographers usually use a 100mm lens because it least distorts the contours of the human face.  The nuance of photo language is more subtle, its slang, evolving meanings, humor, sarcasm, double-entendre, etc.

We expect high school senior portraits, real estate photographs, newspaper, studio portraits, art, advertising and Hollywood publicity photographs, medical and police photographs, etc., to all look a certain way, enabling us to see and process images quickly, for the average person is bombarded with hundreds of images a day, with a limited vocabulary to translate them.

My confusion with the Muhammad photograph is because it's a crossover of photographic styles.  The photograph of John Allen Muhammad on the front page that day was not a in a photo journalistic style but more a Hollywood publicity one.  

Muhammad could easily have been Denzel Washington in a publicity shot for Warner Brothers, so attractive, so warmly colored, so appealing the subject.  All qualities that are the opposite of the evidence we have about the man.

As a photographer I would have been overjoyed to capture such a stunning image in a courtroom, with everything out of my control but the camera.  The editor's job is more complex.  An editor can enhance or diminish a photograph.  Would the photo have been less objectionable if it had been on the jump page, smaller, competing with the Bloomingdales ads?

As a resident of Northern Virginia with two school aged children, I remember those three weeks in October with emotional investment.  I recall the tragic deaths and poignant biographies of so many lives cut brutally short.  I remember the road blocks, school lock-downs, fear of letting my children play outdoors, the non-stop news coverage, a trepidation to do normal things such as shopping, pumping gas, dropping our children off at school.  The police escort to my car when I visited my child's middle school.  Fear was everywhere.

The Post's glamorization of such an emotional subject was an odd thing to do.  It was a...post modern thing to do, which is the hallmark of our age, mixing things up.  Blurring things. Ever since Truman Capote's book, In Cold Blood, we have been looking at the psychopaths among us in a different light.  The Washington Post did that with Muhammad's photograph. What's the real message here?
 

Kief to Carrington North Dakota September 2008

Near Kief, ND September 2008

Left Dan & Marian’s Kief, North Dakota farm early Sunday morning, heading home to Virginia, driving southeast toward interstate expediency.  But first, gravel, the good roads.

Spooked a clutch of juvenile pheasants zig-zagging out of the ditch until their momma glided in, giving direction.  Then this church.  It’s elegantly simple, with finely balanced Lancet windows.  A stately icon of past settlement--of faith, enterprise and now quiet.  A rare quiet, broken by pheasant cackle, grouse wings, fox yips and moonlit coyote howls.  Soon, the flurry of dusty pickups will thump on gravel, punctuated by deer-season thunder.

Stopped for Daryle Beckley’s long-horned cattle drive on Highway 200 near the outskirts of Carrington.  Cowboys sipping coffee, teenagers colas, both eating kuchen and venison sausages.  It’s windy but not too cold.  If only I could slip out of our Toyota van and alight on one of their horses, riding to a place far different from our near-Beltway life. 

 

 

Autumn Goodwill Glory!

Oh happy days!  The weather's finally cooled off, in the high 60s, sunny, although the leaves are still on the trees, still green, or dull yellows, but autumn nonetheless, my favorite season.

 'Just got home from Goodwill with the above treasure, a mid-century modern Frederick Weinberg wrought iron and wicker chair.  I paid a whopping $16, with tax.  Needless to say, it's worth more.  

If ever you tire of predictability in your life, try scouring junk shops for treasures.  Nine times out of 10 you will leave empty handed, or with cheap junk, something I've developed an eccentric enjoyment of, guess it's the company I keep.  But the overall goal of the hunt is good stuff, before it's chucked into the landfill.  

The problem with the above chair, is it would look 100 times better if I had two of them.  Who knows, maybe some day...

Agate hunting Marquette, Michigan (Upper Peninsula) September 2012

 

From novelists Moberg to Mankell: the muscle and bone of Swedish History-first posted Aug. 20, 2009

 

The Road Less Traveled

  ...Two roads diverged...and I
  I took the one less traveled by,
  And that has made all the difference.
                               -- Robert Frost

Some novels work like the muscle on the bone of history. Take Vilhelm Moberg, born in Sweden in 1898 and Henning Mankel, writing today.

Muscle first: Moberg’s The Emigrants and Mankel’s mysteries bookend 160 years of Swedish life, a journey from poverty to capitalism to socialism to varying degrees of socialism and capitalism.  These two writers capture the zeitgeist of those years as newspaper accounts and history texts cannot.

In The Emigrants Karl Oskar and his wife Kristina emigrate to America in the 1850s because of famine in Sweden. Through extraordinary hard work they become wealthy in Minnesota but suffer the loss of roots, family and faith.

At the start of the story, in rural Sweden, they face a brutal winter following a poor harvest, 
        “Kristina baked famine bread; when the rye flour did not suffice
        she added chaff, beechnuts, heather seed and dried berries of the
        mountain ash.  She also tried to grind acorns...however much they
        stretched and added, all the bins...would be empty long before the next
        crop was ripe.” 

After much soul searching Kristina and Karl Oskar emigrate to America. But their homeland is always with them.  In The Last Letter Home, Karl Oskar writes a poignant letter to his sister living in Sweden:
        “My thoughts often wander to the Place where I was born and where
        kind Parents helped me grow up.  Sometimes I think I would like to go
        back for a Visit.  But I could not see Father and Mother in Life, only
        their Tombstones.”
When Kristina was dying, she tastes an apple planted with the seeds she
brought from Sweden, and says, in her last breath,
        “Our apples are ripe.  I’m home...”

Fast forward to the 1990s, to Henning Mankell’s homicide detective stories featuring Detective Kurt Wallander who lives in a now prosperous Sweden. In Sidetracked, Wallander ponders:
        “What kind of world was he living in?...He decided they were living
        in the midst of an era that could be called the Age of Failure. 
        Something they had believed in and built up had turned out to be
        less tenable than expected.  They had thought they were building
        a house, when in reality they were busy raising a monument to
        something already gone and half forgotten.
        
        Now all of Sweden raged around him...People lived so they could
        forget, not remember.  Houses were hiding places rather than cozy
        homes..”

Mankel describes a fellow detective in One Step Behind:
        “Martinsson walked over and stood by the window.  Wallander could
        see how shaken he was.  Once upon a time, he had been an eager
        young recruit with all the best intentions--and at a time when
        becoming a police officer was no longer seen as something noble.
        Young people seemed to despise the profession, in fact.  But
        Martinsson held fast to his ideals and genuinely wanted to be a
        good policeman.  It was only during the last few years that
        Wallander had noticed his faith starting to slip.  Now Wallander
        doubted that Martinsson would make it to retirement.”

Detective Wallander is a divorced dad of a floundering but talented daughter, has a 10-year old car, a ho-hum apartment, diabetes, a senile father.  He navigates a complex police bureaucracy and barely copes at times, plagued by the pettiness of communal washing machine rules, family and job responsibility and elusive affairs of the heart that can gut the soul.

Now the bones:
The Swedish model - Washington Times
More Than Just a Saab Sister
August 2009 by Richard Rahn

STOCKHOLM
Do you think America would be better off with a Swedish-type welfare state?  This question tends to evoke strong reactions from both left and right, yet few understand Sweden’s economic history and the revisions it has been making to its welfare-state model in recent years.  Sweden was a very poor country for most of the 19th century.

The poverty of those years caused many to emigrate from the country, mostly to the U.S. Upper Midwest.  Beginning in the 1870s, Sweden created conditions for developing a high-growth, free-market economy with a slowly growing government sector.  As a result, Sweden for many years had the world’s fastest-growing economy, ultimately producing the third highest per capita income, almost equaling that in the United States by the late 1960s.  Sweden became a rich country before becoming a welfare state.

Sweden began its movement toward a welfare state in the 1960s, when its government sector was about equal to that in the United States.  However, by the late 1980s, government spending grew from 30 percent of gross domestic product to more than 60 percent of GDP.

These policies and outcomes greatly diminished the incentives to work, save and invest.  Economic growth slowed to a crawl.  Other countries that avoided the excess spending, taxing and regulation of Sweden grew more rapidly, leaving Sweden in the dust.  Sweden is still a prosperous country, but far from the top, and its per capita income has fallen to just about 80 percent of that in the United States.

Most Americans know of Swedish socialist policies.  But Sweden’s economic success was achieved with a capitalist model.  Sweden has vacillated between the two for the past 70 years

The Keynesian model of big government appeared in Sweden during the Depression, like the United States, and planted the seed of the Swedish Model or the Middle Way, mixing a robust private industry with an large strata of publicly funded social services.

Sweden today has one of the highest tax rates in the world, starting at 57% on very low incomes. Until 2007 it exported half of what’s produced.  But like the rest of the world Sweden’s suffered steep decline since 2008.  Sweden voted against linking their currency to the euro in 2003.

Sweden’s population is just over 9 million.  Its the 88th largest country.  The  U. S. population is 307, 212,123 and is the 4th largest country in the world, according to the CIA  World Factbook.